TPM, Digby and Steve Benen, among many others, are noting that Scott Brown, newly elected to the senate by the people of Massachusetts in their wisdom, can understand what can motivate a person to fly a plane into an IRS office (via Digby):

CAVUTO: We have a guy who is just ranting at the system, ranting at the IRS, ranting at big government, the need for health care, not the need for unions – I mean really crazy stuff. I would just be curious of your reaction to all that.

SCOTT BROWN: Well It’ s certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things effecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better.

One thing I certainly agree with Massachusetts’ new senator on is that, yes, we need to do better.

Update: TPM has video of Human Events editor Jed Babbin joking at CPAC about Grover Norquest possibly being the suicide pilot and getting laughs from the rightwing attendees (via TPM):

“And let me just say, I’m really happy to see Grover today,” said Babbin. “He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building.”

How do you engage with people who engage in this kind of discourse and do so in public in an avowed attempt to win people to their cause?

Update II: A regular and frequent commenter makes the following joke and the admins at redstate don’t have a problem with leaving it on their site. Redstate is notorious for quickly criticizing heresy, even banning commenter heretics and sometimes even erasing the offending comments. We can take this comment’s persistence to indicate tacit support or at least lack of strong disagreement:

Sounds like he could have been but he forgotRichard Mullins Saturday, February 20th at 10:39AM EST (link)
to place his application. I’m still pissed that he destroyed a good Piper Cherokee by ramming it in a building. He should have save the plane and put machine guns on the wings. [emphasis added]

The title is in response to another commenter’s ‘joke’ that Stack was an Obama administration appointee. It will be interesting to see if this commenter is rebuked for making this joke and if the comment is taken down.